Review of Humanité (1999) by Walter M — 08 Jul 2005

[font=Century Gothic]"Humanite" starts out in a small French village where everybody knows everybody else. An eleven year old girl has been brutally raped and murdered. Police superintendent Pharaon de Winter is on the case...or is he?(To be honest, he certainly is agonizing over the case.) He does seem to be spending most of the time as a third wheel to a couple, Domino and Joseph, who can barely keep their hands to themselves. In this kind of relationship, there seems to be something going on between Pharaon and Domino, but on a platonic level. [/font].

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[font=Century Gothic]I watched the first half of "Humanite" on Thursday night and at first found the movie extremely off-putting. I was not quite sure what to make of the characters or the situation for that matter.(And the occasional extreme close-up was not helping either.) But then I spent the following day thinking it over and it dawned on me that what was happening in the movie was fairly straightforward - an investigation of a brutal murder in a rural precinct that was simply ill-equipped and was not prepared to handle such an investigation. This definitely helped in watching the second half of the movie the following night. What makes this movie unique is its novelistic structure - incorporating the individual stories of the characters into the movie and occasionally subordinating the investigation to the background. [/font].